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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

"Seiki is missing a golden opportunity to dominate the desktop display market by removing the television tuner, speakers, and remote, and then reallocating that budget to a 60Hz or better input (HDMI 2 and/or DisplayPort), a matte screen surface, and instant-on DPMI support, all the while retaining the market-wrecking price."

And while we're at it, I want a unicorn as well! Seriously, speakers, a remote and a TV tuner are like, $5 in parts max whereas everything he just listed involves upgrading silicon fabrication processes and designing new ASICs.

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I'll take my unicorn in black, too.

I'm not a monitor manufacturer, just an opinionated blogger. But are you telling me that a matte surface would cost more to manufacture than a glossy surface? DPMI support costs a lot? Of my wishlist items, DisplayPort seems the toughest to this layperson, but even that doesn't seem unreasonable.

In my earlier blog entry about the same monitor, I said I'd also be willing to pay a tiny bit more. If I could get the "professional" version with the attributes I listed above for $600, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I think you mean DPMS, DPMI is a little different[1].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPMI

I'd need to dig a bit to know for sure, but I'd probably they're using off the shelf parts for HDMI that may or may not support DPMS, and either way it'll probably be some hardware changes. If they've already tooled up, yes, it will take some coin to make the transition.

Oops! You're right, I had that initialism wrong. I've corrected it to DPMS.

Also, I will concede that it wouldn't be cheap to add the features I want, but I'd nevertheless pay a small premium to see them happen.

It doesn't only cost money, it will also cost time. In this case the time is the important part, not the extra two dollars you are willing to spend. This could bump up the release date 6 months or more and by then they have lost whatever market there was.

> ...But are you telling me that a matte surface would cost more to manufacture than a glossy surface?

Ex TV Product Planner here - yes matte costs more than glossy. If nothing else there is the volume but I think the production techniques for glossy are intrinsically cheaper too.

Thanks for posting this. It's good to finally have a rationale for why glossy has dominated matte in recent years beyond the one I've heard over and over ("glossy looks better at first glance in a Best Buy"). If it's truly a matter of price, I suppose it's fair that only professional monitors use matte screens.

I for one be willing to pay a modest premium for matte.

It isn't the only reason, contrast ratio is higher too so it is needed to be competitive on specification too. If you can control the lighting so that it doesn't reflect to you it can be better as matte will scatter light in all directions. The intrinsic cost difference would be pretty small without the economies of scale I think. Matte would have to be special order panels and you wouldn't be able to pick them up on the spot market.

"matte will scatter light in all directions."

Unless you are saying one pixel smears into another, doesn't scattering light in all directions end up giving better viewing angles with good brightness uniformity?

I always thought the reason a matte screen hurt contrast was because of scattered light from the room raising the black level.

Mostly I'm talking about ambient light, hence worse blacks and lower contrast ratios. It may also scatter outgoing light reducing sharpness and brightness (some may be scattered back in to the panel) a little but that is pretty minor.

Dell will beat them to it - the new Dell UltraHD, while only 28", is a proper desktop 4K monitor with what will (most likely) be far better color accuracy and usability, for $699.

Seiki just dropped their price to $500 which is attractive, but I think the Dell's build quality and internals will be worth the $200 premium.

The dell 28 inch 4k monitor is also only 30hz though. The 60Hz ones are still more in the 1200-3000 range

The Asus 28" 4K is 60Hz @699, and the Lenovo 28" 4K is 60Hz @799. They won't be available until April, though.

All of these are using TN panels. TN's bad viewing angles in a 28" size must be a sight to behold.

The fact that it can only do 30Hz in UHD mode is probably one of the reasons it's so cheap - going to 60 or 120Hz is a two to four-fold increase in processing.

It'll happen - it's just a matter of time (less than 18 months if Moore's law is anything to go by)

I'm sure they could do it now, no Moore's law required. The technology and parts are already available.

I think the lack of 60-120Hz has more to do with keeping costs down. Low production costs translate to lower prices for the consumer. By selling these TVs at absolute rock bottom prices, they can sell them by the truck loads and, more importantly, make a name for themselves. These last couple weeks I've seen Seiki's name brought up dozens of times all over the internet whereas a month ago, I don't think I've ever heard their name before.

If this is part of their marketing plan, it's working beautifully.

>> I think the lack of 60-120Hz has more to do with keeping costs down

That's exactly what I meant - there have been displays for years that can do really high refresh rates at 4K, they have just been quite expensive.

Due to Moore's law, image processing ASICs with that kind of processing power should be as cheap as what's in the Seiki in a year or two.

I believe IBM produced a high resolution monitor which was a single panel, but acted as if it were 4 smaller displays, complete with 4 separate display input cables. Something similar could technically be done to re-use lower-res, but higher-speed existing display controller parts on 4K panels.

Some of the 4k displays out there are literally two panels glued together. Fortunately, DisplayPort supports multiple displays per connection, but DP hubs are expensive, presumably even if they're internal to the monitor. I'm not sure that using this feature would work for having two chips drive a single monolithic panel.

I believe the 4K displays are merely presenting themselves as if they were two displays glued together -- do you have a source that says it is actually two glasses??

Two special display input cables (DMS-59). IBM T221. I have one. It's... hard. The max I could drive it was on 25Hz -- two 1920x2400@25Hz panes besides each other. Watching a movie on it was a weird experience so I set it aside. If someone has 4 DVI outputs, you could drive it surely at 41Hz which would make a huge difference ( the monitor is up for sale :) ).

Speed your movie up from 24fps to 25fps; it should make a huge difference.

For some reason, I read your post in Sterling Archer's voice.

Daaaanger zooone

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